Challenges and Hopes

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Edited By Viktor Stepanenko and Yaroslav Pylynskyi

Ukraine’s protest movement of 2013–14, known as the Euromaidan, and its culmination, the people’s uprising in late 2013–early 2014 became one of the most dramatic world events in recent years. The accession of Crimea to the Russian Federation and military conflict in the Donbas demonstrate that the dramatic dynamics of the country’s ongoing transformation are still far from predictable. This book examines the manifold aspects of Ukraine’s current crisis and its political upheaval. The contributors to the book, Ukrainian experts in a variety of disciplinary fields, explore social, political and cultural reasons and factors behind the country’s transformation in its national and regional dimensions, the impact of Ukraine’s revolution on European and global politics, and also the new challenges of tough reforms with which the country is faced. The contributors share the view that the Euromaidan brought new opportunities for Ukraine’s modern development and the greatest historical chance for the country’s European future since independence in 1991.

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Ten years after the 2004 “Orange” revolution, Ukraine again came to be in the main focus of European and world politics. The wave of protest movements, known as the Euro-Maidan, arose in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. The longest nation-wide protest marathon in the country’s modern history, lasting from November 2013 to March 2014, with the Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalesznosti (the capital’s central square) as its epicentre, became the trigger for the people’s uprising in January–February 2014 and the subsequent dramatic, albeit long-awaited, transformation of the country. The chain reaction of this transformation, concentrated in a brief period of time, involved many dramatic events: the killing of over a hundred protesters by special police, the collapse of Yanukovych’s repressive state apparatus after his flight from the country, the accession of Crimea to the Russian Federation, the pre-term election of the new president Petro Poroshenko in one electoral turnover (for the first time in Ukraine’s complex political history), radical separatism and the ensuing strange, “hybrid” war (officially still called an “anti-terrorist operation”) with many hundreds of militants and civilians killed on the Donbas, and all the complex socio-economic consequences of the country’s radical geopolitical turn towards Europe.

If the Maidan, a sort of Ukrainian contribution to the arsenal of the worlds’ protest movement and direct public engagement in policy-making, has repeatedly occurred over the last ten years, there must be deep and latent public dissatisfaction with the governmental politics, with the social, economic and political situation and...

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